Tuesday, September 15, 2015




"These are the stories the dogs tell, when the fire
burns high and the wind is from the north"

from City
by Clifford Simak  

A quick stop in Vancouver, which means the Sylvia Hotel on 
English Bay, and dogs on the seawall, 


and gulls on rocks 


and 
rocks without gulls,  


and sea
washed pebbles,


the mysteries of the deep, Cthulhu?  


the last flowers of summer 


Favorite eateries 



and funky boutiques.


"There is mystery here, but a soft, sure mystery that is 

understood and only remains a mystery because I want
it so. The mystery of the nighthawk against a darkening sky, 
the puzzle of the firefly along the lilac hedge."


from Time and Again
by Clifford Simak


Wednesday, September 9, 2015

"Recall, reader if ever in the mountains 
a mist has caught you, through which you could not 
see except as moles do through the skin
how when the moist vapours began to dissipate,
the sphere of the sun enters freely through them ,
and your imagination will quickly see how, at first 
I saw the sun again, which is now at its setting"

from Purgatory X11, 1-9
by Dante translator Charles S. Singleton



One morning at the cabin I looked out so see a stream of
fog running thru a low spot where the land dips between the
 ridge where the cabin sits before it rises again, slightly to form 
a finger like peninsula jutting into the slough. The fog moved out
through the brush along the edge of the slough becoming a water
fall of mist pouring down the bank to the water and eventually 
dancing like the narrows before burning off in the morning sun.
Fog is the stuff of magic and mystery.







"In the morning, mist comes up from the sea by the cliffs 
beyond Kingsport. White and feathery it comes from the deep 
to its brothers the clouds, full of dreams of dank pastures 
and caves of leviathan. And later, in still summer rains on the 
steep roofs of poets, the clouds scatter bits of those dreams,
that men shall not live without rumor of old strange secrets, 
and wonders that planets tell planets alone in the night. 
When tales fly thick in the grottoes of tritons, and conchs in 
seaweed cities blow wild tunes learned from the Elder Ones, 
then great eager mists flock to heaven laden with lore, and 
oceanward eyes on tile rocks see only a mystic whiteness, 
as if the cliff's rim were the rim of all earth, and 
the solemn bells of buoys tolled free in the aether of faery. "

from The Strange High House in the Mist
by H.P. Lovecraft